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After carving out a wide, 57-cent trading range over the previous two sessions, natural gas futures stayed close to home Friday as many traders choose to wait on the sidelines until a clearer fundamental picture develops. The September contract finished at $3.303, down 6.4 cents for the day, but up 26.3 cents for the week.

Calgary-based Samson Canada Ltd. and Courage Energy Inc. jointly announced that Samson’s previous offer to acquire all of the issued and outstanding Courage shares, at C$5.20 per common share, ended last Thursday, with Samson acquiring about 95% of the shares. In the next few days, Samson said it would acquire the remaining shares of Courage to merge the two companies. Samson Canada is a subsidiary of Samson Investment Co., a privately held Tulsa-based oil and gas company, with a current production of 13,000 boe/d. The Courage acquisition will bring production to 17,000 boe/d. Core areas are Rainbow, Central Alberta and northeast British Columbia.

Once again softening cash prices followed the lead of theprevious afternoon’s screen movement, and if that tendencycontinues to hold true, expect another falling cash market today.Wednesday’s declines ranged from about a nickel to 20 cents, andCalifornia stood out again with losses greater than those in thegeneral market.

A handful of law firms have filed class action lawsuits onbehalf of Avista Corp.’s stockholders after the company reported aloss of $22.1 million or $0.47 per share in the second quarter,stemming from unhedged power trades in the forward market.

Cash prices gave their best efforts Tuesday at imitating theprevious day’s screen rise of slightly over 35 cents, and quite afew points came close. But when the initially firmer July futurescontract made an abrupt about-face at mid-morning Tuesday andheaded south to eventually wind up the day more than a dime lower,cash numbers dutifully followed the screen’s lead once again inlate trading.

FERC last week upheld its previous orders accepting TexasEastern Transmission’s tariff provisions that require emergencyshippers, such as hospitals, to reimburse non-emergency shippersjust for the loss of firm transportation capacity — not the lossof gas supply — stemming from pro-rata curtailments.

Destin Pipeline canceled Friday morning a force majeure that hadbeen issued on the previous afternoon due to a temporary shutdownof the BP Amoco Pascagoula (MS) Processing Plant. Destin had askedplatform operators to reduce production to 25% of scheduledquantities until the plant came back on-line.

Prices usually spend Mondays recovering at least partially fromthe declines of the previous Friday. Yesterday was a reversal formost eastern points-they were giving back some of the gains thathad been realized Friday. The East tended to range from flat todown as much as a dime or more on a few Gulf Coast pipes.Trunkline’s two Louisiana pools were especially weak.

Michael L. Williams has been named chairman of the TexasRailroad Commission (TRC). He replaces previous chairman TonyGarza. Williams is leading an agency-industry review of thecommission’s regulatory framework. He said, “the world energyindustry is changing dramatically – government needs to change itsapproach as well. With that in mind, the commission can and shouldoperate to allow Texas producers to act faster, operate less costlyand with more flexibility.